Truck attacks -- a frightening tool of terror, with a history

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Photos:Bastille Day terror: Harrowing images of truck attack in Nice

Baby strollers are seen on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, on Friday, July 15. A 31-year-old native of Tunisia and resident of Nice drove into a crowd during the southern French city's Bastille Day celebrations around 10:45 p.m. on Thursday, July 14, killing at least 84 people and leaving around 202 injured.

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Photos:Bastille Day terror: Harrowing images of truck attack in Nice

A woman cries, asking for her son, as she walks near the scene of the attack.

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Photos:Bastille Day terror: Harrowing images of truck attack in Nice

A forensics team inspects the scene of the attack.

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Photos:Bastille Day terror: Harrowing images of truck attack in Nice

A man looks at the scene of the attack on the Promenade des Anglais.

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Photos:Bastille Day terror: Harrowing images of truck attack in Nice

Forensics investigators examine a truck at the scene of the attack.

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Photos:Bastille Day terror: Harrowing images of truck attack in Nice

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Photos:Bastille Day terror: Harrowing images of truck attack in Nice

Bodies of victims covered by sheets remained at the scene of the attack early Friday.

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Photos:Bastille Day terror: Harrowing images of truck attack in Nice

A man sits next to the body of a victim following the attack.

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Photos:Bastille Day terror: Harrowing images of truck attack in Nice

Authorities confirmed that the driver of the truck was killed by police.

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Photos:Bastille Day terror: Harrowing images of truck attack in Nice

The truck plowed into a crowd leaving a Bastille Day fireworks display in the French resort city of Nice. One witness, an American who was about 15 feet from the truck, said the driver accelerated and pointed his tractor-trailer into the crowd, mowing people over.

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Photos:Bastille Day terror: Harrowing images of truck attack in Nice

A man lies near a covered body at the scene of the attack on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice.

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Photos:Bastille Day terror: Harrowing images of truck attack in Nice

Emergency teams assist wounded people at the scene.

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Photos:Bastille Day terror: Harrowing images of truck attack in Nice

A photo from the Twitter account of a reporter for CNN affiliate France 2 shows witnesses being interviewed inside the Hotel Negresco after the attack. According to Alban Mikoczy, these people are not injured.

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Photos:Bastille Day terror: Harrowing images of truck attack in Nice

Wounded people are evacuated from the scene where the truck drove into the crowd during the Bastille Day celebrations.

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Photos:Bastille Day terror: Harrowing images of truck attack in Nice

Armed French police move people away from the Promenade des Anglais in Nice in the aftermath of Thursday's attack.

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Photos:Bastille Day terror: Harrowing images of truck attack in Nice

Medical workers attend to an injured woman.

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Photos:Bastille Day terror: Harrowing images of truck attack in Nice

Police security forces deployed in the center of Nice.

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Photos:Bastille Day terror: Harrowing images of truck attack in Nice

Tony Molina, a U.S. police officer on vacation in Nice, witnessed the terrible scene from his hotel room. He told CNN he thought he heard between 30 and 40 gunshots. "I saw the truck right below us and it had already driven down the boardwalk for a half a mile."

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Photos:Bastille Day terror: Harrowing images of truck attack in Nice

BFM-TV, a CNN affiliate in France, reported that police shot at the truck to try to stop it.

(CNN)It used to be that we worried about truck bombs. Now we have to worry about trucks used as weapons.

The tactic has been adopted by jihadist terrorists in the West, including in the United States, but fortunately the lethality of these attacks had been relatively low -- until July's attack in Nice that killed at least 84.

In December, 12 people were killed when a tractor-trailor plowed into a crowd at a Berlin Christmas market, in an act that ISIS claimed it inspired.

The tactic has been a long time coming.

Al Qaeda's Yemeni branch encouraged its recruits in the West in its 2010 webzine, Inspire, to use trucks as a weapon. An article headlined "The Ultimate Mowing Machine" called for deploying a pickup truck as a "mowing machine, not to mow grass but mow down the enemies of Allah."

In September 2014, an ISIS spokesman similarly encouraged such attacks, saying of ISIS' enemies, "run him over with your car."

A month later, on October 20, 2014 Canadian Martin Rouleau Couture, who had traveled to Turkey in what appears to have been an unsuccessful attempt to join ISIS in neighboring Syria, ran over two soldiers in Quebec, killing one and injuring another.

Also in 2014, there were two such car attacks in France in the cities of Nantes and Dijon, though the motives of the attackers, one of whom shouted "Allah Akbar!" after one of the attacks, are murky. In both cases the assailants had long histories of mental illness,according to the BBC.

The tactic has also been used in the United States. In 2006, Mohammed Taheri-azar, an American-Iranian, drove an SUV into an area crowded with students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He later said that that the United States government had been "killing his people across the sea" and he was taking revenge and he was "thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of Allah." Luckily the attack killed no one but it did injure nine.

A year later, a pair of British terrorists opposed to the Iraq war rammed their Jeep into the arrivals area of Glasgow Airport, but killed no one.

The technique of using vehicles as weapons has been frequently employed by Palestinian terrorists targeting Israeli citizens.

We don't know enough yet to say what prompted the Nice attack. But what the attack shows is that we are now in an era when lone terrorists are becoming increasingly lethal.

Recall the attack at the Orlando nightclub that killed 49 in June carried out by a single gunman, Omar Mateen.

Until the Nice attack, the most lethal terrorist attack in the West carried out by a lone terrorist was by Anders Breivik, a Norwegian neo-Nazi who killed 77 people in 2011.

(Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City with a truck bomb in 1995, but he was aided in every respect of the attack by co-conspirator Terry Nichols who is now serving a life term. There is no indication so far that the Nice attacker operated as part of a terrorist group.)

This will have important implications for how we conceive of the danger of lone terrorists in the West going forward. Law enforcement authorities in the States and other Western countries will have to consider the vulnerabilities to vehicular attacks of large, packed crowds of the kind that we saw jamming the waterfront in Nice celebrating their national holiday on Thursday.